"… Huh."

Anthony looks back at Kaede's sister again.

Such smol. Much shy. Very staring. Wow.

Little kid hopefully does not report back to her father because that would be awfully creepy, but Anthony does not think he will risk it.

"At least we're moving onto new things," he says. "Or at least – we are, I'm not sure about your school."

He shrugs. "Sure, I guess, but it's not like I pay a whole lot of attention in class anyway."

"No? Not got an undying passion for Pythagoras's theorem?"

"Alas, no. Besides, I've known it for ages."

"Oh? How'd you learn about it?"

"Don't remember. Looked it up somewhere."

"Needed it for a game, when I was like six."

"—a game? What sort of nerdy game was that?"

"It had a map and distances and a grid structure and if you wanted to conquer villages a certain distance away you wanted to time it properly and – basically I was curious why it started using non-integer times for diagonal squares. And how it figured the distances out."

...he can't kiss Anthony right now. This is terrible. He settles for a knee bump. "Of course you were."

Anthony grins. "I thought it was really weird when I found out it worked the same for 3D – I mean, that it's still squaring and rooting, not cubing and cube roots."

"It's not that weird! It makes sense!"

"It does! It's just square rooting the sum of the squares! But I thought it'd be – taking the first root of the first power, that is doing nothing, then square rooting the sum of the squares, then cube rooting the sum of the cubes, and so on?"

"Right, I mean it makes geometric sense that its always squares rather than cubes and all that."

"Oh, right, yeah. But at the time I wasn't testing it with a ruler or anything, I was just – I had a pattern in mind and it didn't fit it."

"Fair enough. Also, I win."

He does.

Anthony pouts. Briefly. Long enough to be noticed.

"I only learnt this game today, though."

Ahhh so cute.

"Whiner."

"I'm just taking what I can get." Pause. "Which is apparently nothing, so far, since I haven't won, but still."

Giggle.

Another match?

Yes!

Anthony does better this time!

Kaede does the same! Still better than Anthony but not by as much!

Yay!

Anthony tries not to be too cute. Not too cute.